


all roads into a knot, all knots under the blade

by MagpieCrown



Series: dear fellow traveler (miragehound) [3]
Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Mild Sexual Content, Other, Past Character Death, Possession, Worldbuilding, also it's not explicit but there are some skeletons present jsyk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 02:13:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29801370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagpieCrown/pseuds/MagpieCrown
Summary: Armed with Evelyn Witt's keycard, Bloodhound travels to the New Dawn plant to find out why their mother was there on the day of the disaster.Elliott tags along, naturally.Things go wrong.
Relationships: Bloodhound/Mirage | Elliott Witt
Series: dear fellow traveler (miragehound) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2177295
Comments: 7
Kudos: 26





	all roads into a knot, all knots under the blade

**Author's Note:**

> we are back in Bloodhound's head for this one! you don't need to have read other works in the series to understand what's going on; though it is the same arc, there are only a couple of minor references to previous events.
> 
> as a general warning, this fic is somewhat heavier than the previous two; grief made present instead of removed. stay safe <3

_there for the grace of god go we_

_there for the grace of god go we_

_there for the grace of time and chance_

_and entropy’s cruel hands_

_(so open your arms to me_

_open your arms to me)_

Bloodhound lives death to death.

They rise at dusk of every Sunday to billowing steam and skin that fits ill and stiff and the wrong, synthetic taste in their mouth, and the days that come afterwards serve the one purpose of measuring out the time until they fall at the end of another week - only to rise again.

Although, ‘every Sunday’ is not the correct way to describe it. Bloodhound is not always there for the end-of-the-week brawls - their duty to Talos and the distance between it and the base dictate their own rules. But every month Bloodhound finds themself retracing their footsteps to the arena for season games, and offering their worth up for the judgement, and trusting it to be enough.

It usually is not. You cannot win every game you play, no matter how vicious your fight for survival is. And even winning the right to live another week or another month is a hollow, lukewarm kind of comfort, an empty catharsis, watered down by the dogged futility of it, by the unexplainable _routine_ that eventually desensitizes even those least affined to cynicism.

A month is a terribly short time. A moon lives and dies within its full turn, and Bloodhound’s existence is tuned to the same rhythm.

Still, when the arena summons, Bloodhound goes back in. To call it comforting would mean to lie, but there is security in the familiarity of it, like any routine eventually feels secure regardless of what bones it stands on.

Bloodhound lives death to death, and it began long before they even learned of the Games. They carry their dead in their blood exposed to the air, as every parting gouges a mawful out of them. The carcass of their life is butchered into segments, cut away piece by horrible piece, made no more comprehensible by their own surrogate dips into death. 

(Sometimes Bloodhound thinks they glimpse something in the infinite stretches when time loses its ability to exist, when they are just a line of code waiting to be fed into the bioprinter. They do not know what to do with those glimpses.) 

Bloodhound cannot really tell what being unbutchered and whole is supposed to be like, what a trail looks like when it is unwatered by blood. The first losses happened so early that whatever scuffed memories they still retain of the time _before_ feel closer to a dream.

They do not know how much of them remains. They do not know when the cleaver will dig in again. They do not know what will happen when there is not enough left to cut into anymore.

***

The Games are on an interseasonal hiatus, so Bloodhound and Elliott coordinate their time off and travel to Talos together, eventually making their way over the snow dunes to Bloodhound’s village, Krákuskel. 

While Elliott is sleeping off the jetlag, they spend the day catching up with Gerdur - the elder they appointed two decades ago to rule in their stead - and gauging the state of the land. The seasons on Talos are fickle and poorly predictable: thirty years is nothing for a planet, and it is still reeling from the Freeze shackling its volcanic heart, opposites locked in eternal mutual destruction that ripples outwards in form of storms and earth-trembles and massive melts that freeze to glaciers overnight. But Bloodhound converses with people on snow watch and observes the sky and the air and the birds, and nature does not lie. Talos is wintering, and wintering deep.

Which is fortunate for them - springs and autumns would be a much more dangerous time to travel across the land. Maybe fate is on their side. Maybe their mission will be successful.

Bloodhound emerges from the Wild and trudges back to Krákuskel, thigh-deep in snow, thumbing idly at the rectangle of plastic hidden in one of their pockets. Its shape is familiar in theory, though a lot less worn and worried, forgotten on a shelf for three decades instead of being carried around like a talisman with its meaning made obsolete.

Evelyn Witt’s keycard from the New Dawn plant. A card with the same level of clearance Bloodhound’s mother once had.

(“Ma, this is Bloodhound. Hound, this is my mom, Evelyn.” 

Elliott looks like he is going to vibrate out of his own skin with nervous excitement, and a part of Bloodhound that is as ingrained in them by now as knowing which way is north wants to reach out and steady him and offer him - something. A measure of comfort, though surely there is no reason for him to fret. This is _his_ mother, after all, and her home, and - Bloodhound is the stranger here.

“Ma’am.” They nod, suddenly out of place in the tiny hall. Its painted walls are covered in framed pictures, a handful of small objects - souvenirs? - are scattered on a shelf in front of the mirror, and something is cooking in the kitchen, the scent of meat and spices so thick and rich it filters right through Bloodhound’s respirator. 

They stand amidst it all, plunged into the middle of someone else’s history, afraid to move.

“Evelyn, please,” Elliott’s mother waves them off. Her grey hair is tightened into a bun; she is wearing a _‘Hot &Spicy’ _ apron, hands clasped casually in front of it. She does not offer a handshake, but her smile is warm. “And of course, honey, you’re Brigida’s child, you are...uh…” She trails off; her fingers twitch as if trying to snap, and a chill runs up Bloodhound’s spine, cradles the back of their head. “Oh it’s right on the tip of my tongue…”

“It’s Bloodhound, mom,” Elliott interjects, a hint of worry marring his expression.

“No no, just give me a moment and it’ll come to me, your mother talked about you so often, I can’t believe I forgot.” 

A lost look crosses Evelyn’s face, and she reaches up as if to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear, but nothing is out of place. Bloodhound thinks about Elliott running his fingers through his hair. He gets just as round-eyed, too, when he is stuck casting about for a missing word.

Bloodhound has waited patiently, and after a lot of hesitation - hesitation they cannot blame him for - Elliott finally decided to confide in them about what troubles Evelyn. Though unversed in her particular illness, Bloodhound is not unfamiliar with long-term ailments in general - they understand how unmoored they can make one feel. 

“I took on the name of Bloodhound many years ago,” they say and wait for Evelyn to look at them. It is doubtful that she can see their eyes through the reflective lenses of their glasses, but Bloodhound meets hers anyway, and - oh - they are the same colour, sunlight through wild honey, buckwheat or maybe heather. “It is the only one I have now.”

They see the moment Evelyn understands, followed by the moment she allows herself to abandon the struggle.

“Of course, dear.”)

Evelyn was surprised by Bloodhound’s request to talk about their mother, carefully made well after dinner. She confessed that she could not remember much, not after all these years, and the day of the catastrophe has faded from her memory in its entirety. Elliott made a complicated face in Bloodhound’s periphery at her words before slipping his mask back on. Maybe you are supposed to guard yourself from your family too - Bloodhound would not know. 

But then Evelyn perked up and sent Elliott to retrieve a box from the storage and dug the keycard out of it. She might not know why their mother was there on the day of the disaster, but maybe, this way, Bloodhound could find out for themself. 

The trip itself had to wait until the break, but now they are here, crunching through the depth hoar and greatly regretting not putting a pair of snowshoes on before venturing out. The Games have turned them into a clueless city-dweller.

Back at their hut, Elliott, though still groggy and a bit disoriented, is forced awake by hunger worthy of a goliath, and Bloodhound laughs at his plight and feeds him Gerdur’s graciously shared cooking. They intend to go back out afterwards and see who would agree to lend them a snowglider, but Elliott, now fully awake, expresses a hunger of a different sort, and Bloodhound is happy to give in. Who would not be?

They lie on top of him afterwards, arms around each other, sweat sticking their fronts together. It is bound to become uncomfortable soon, and honestly, both of them could use a bath, but for now, Bloodhound is too content to move.

Elliott is babbling away already, the sound of his voice smoothing over the quiet rasps of their breaths, and Bloodhound thumbs the slightly raised lines on his shoulders, their positions matching their splayed fingers. They are already smoothing out - nothing severe or angry, nothing that would truly hurt.

They do not notice Elliott trail off until he shifts beneath them (inside them, still), fingers flexing over the sharp blades of their shoulders.

“Hound? What’s up.”

They must be more obvious than they thought. Bloodhound leans to the side to grab their respirator and breathe into it for several beats. They should not actually keep it off during - _exertions_ \- but giving up on the chance to kiss Elliott has proven to be an impossible task, and Bloodhound is adept at picking their battles. 

If Elliott notices their stalling, he is kind enough not to mention it. The movement jostles them slightly where they are still connected, and Elliott’s hands slide lower to keep them balanced, map out their waist and hips and backside and press their bodies tighter, _deeper_ together, and oh, again, already? Is _that_ not an alluring thought. 

But Bloodhound resists the temptation in a titanic exercise of will and puts the mask back down and returns to their previous position, pillowing their head on their crossed forearms so that they can look at him.

“You do not have to come with me tomorrow.”

Like this, chest-to-chest, the two of them are close enough that Bloodhound can see Elliott roll his eyes in fond exasperation. “Yes, I remember, you’ve said this before - first at my mom’s place, then four times back at the base, and twice on the ship, but hey, who’s counting? Have some faith, Houndie, I’m not imcontepe-- inconpete-- I know my stuff.”

“I never implied otherwise.”

“Good.” His hands slide back up, to the safe dips and curves of their spine. “And it’s, well - it’s for your mom.”

Elliott exposes himself so carelessly sometimes, and although Bloodhound does not mind - the opposite, really, for they would never choose to harm him - the second-hand discomfort makes them frown. “You do not owe me…”

“If you are about to imply that I’m doing this to repay you for what you’ve done for _my_ mom, I’m gonna stop you right here.” Elliott’s face is soft when he interrupts them, but the look in his eyes betrays the underlying steel of his conviction. “I wanna be there for you. Let me help.”

He shifts again, which brings the focus of Bloodhound’s attention much further down, and this is genuinely the worst time to be talking about their mothers but they have nobody to blame except for themself for bringing it up.

Elliott is, in fact, competent, a good fighter with a mind for tactics and a level of understanding of the enemy’s motivations that rivals Bloodhound’s own, though honed with different tools and for different reasons, their convergent evolutions like wings of a bird and a bat. Bloodhound has always been alone on these expeditions, and having someone there to watch their back - having _Elliott_ there to watch their back - should be a comfort, and it _is._ But their heart is still uneasy where it beats against his even as they begin to move together once more.

Bloodhound lives death to death.

***

“Ready?” Elliott asks. His quiet voice echoes down the dark hallway, pushes off the iced-over walls like the rays of their headlamps.

Bloodhound does a quick mental inventory. They are four levels deep into what remains of the research wing of the underground part of New Dawn - five if one were to count from the eastern side, the broken walls grinding against each other like displaced tectonic plates. The production and retrieval sections have suffered the brunt of the explosion, but this part still stands, relatively unharmed. 

They have weapons, explosives, medical supplies, rations of food and water though they do not expect to linger for much more than half a day. Their comms are linked in case they become separated, and on the way down here Bloodhound has checked and refreshed the trail markings from their previous visits.

(“What are you doing?” Elliott asks as Bloodhound finishes scraping a rune into the wall, exactly on their eye level.

“The GPS signal is not uniform throughout.” They check their handiwork and resheath the knife. “I have gotten lost here before. It would be a bad death.”

Elliott says nothing. Maybe he is finally realizing that this is not a leisure trip.)

Bloodhound has come here many times before, to these unyielding doors, their father’s keycard tucked away against their heart. They have brought it with them this time, too, though they have already scoured the entirety of what lies behind the doors it can open. 

And here they are again, and beyond sprawls the section dedicated to branthium research - and Evelyn’s keycard is clenched in Bloodhound’s fist. 

They are not ready.

“I am,” they say, and step forward before the lie catches up to them, and press the card to the reader.

It might not even work. The card might not have the clearance after all, the doors might be stuck, something might have broken. There might be nothing beyond them.

With a grinding screech of metal on metal, the doors slide open, and the two of them are flooded with electric light.

Bloodhound’s axe flies into their hand as they dive back into the tide of receding shadows, head tilted so that the frame of their goggles shields their eyes from the worst of the glare. Their mind is working frantically - is the place occupied? inhabited? who has claimed it? - before they pause long enough to assess the situation and realize that the room before them is...empty.

Empty and alight and strangely warm, warm enough that Bloodhound feels the difference in pressure where it is shouldering its way past them and through the doors.

“What the hell,” Elliott whispers next to them; his cloaking net shimmers as he reappears. “What - is someone still here?”

Bloodhound has no answer, and so they say nothing. They venture cautiously into the room, turning off their headlamps. Sonar bathes the scene in shades of red and dissipates without a trace when it finds nothing to snag onto.

It must be reception; the layout is similar to the lobbies of the upper levels. Some of the emergency systems are still working, fed by a few crooked solar panels - that is why the doors were powered enough to respond to the keycard in the first place - but this is...different. All the overhead lamps are on, as well as the recessed lights in the floor along the walls, and Bloodhound would almost expect to hear some sort of cheerful lobby music or hear the tinkling of a fountain if not for the overturned furniture and the broken glass, but there is only silence. If a living being has found a way to turn all the lights and the heating on, they are not here anymore. 

Nothing about this feels right.

Bloodhound shakes off the eeriness of it all. They are here for a reason.

They stride over to the massive front desk and look over the objects scattered in its various nooks until they spot a tablet. It is standard issue, just like the half a dozen tablets Bloodhound has found in other lobbies of the plant - if its function is the same as well, it might store the timestamps of employees punching in and out of their shifts. Its battery must be long empty, but that does not deter them: they have brought a power bank for that exact reason. 

Bloodhound flips the cover open, and their blood freezes.

There are two types of threats that can be held in your hands. One is a plant bristling with poisonous spikes, a burrowing parasite, a scorching coal: you drop them instantly, crush underfoot if you need to. The other is a venomous snake, gnashing jaws, a bird of prey trying to claw your wrists to shreds: you hold them as tightly as you can and you _do not let go._

Sometimes, the ability to determine the category of the new threat quickly enough makes all the difference.

Bloodhound drops the tablet.

“Wha-- Hound?” Elliott walks over and leans to take a look but reels back from it. “Yikes? It’s...it’s not mould, is it?”

“No.” Their hands are tingling, and Bloodhound fights the desire to shake them. They have not touched it, even through the gloves - there is no need. “I do not know what it is.”

A thick black substance is seeping out of the tablet’s ports, pools on the desk in syrupy splotches. It glistens in the overhead lights. There is no smell, as far as Bloodhound can tell.

“Not oil either - but even if it were, why would it be in the...in the tablet…” Elliott’s expression sours. “Okay, this goo is weird. Very weird. Giving me the heebies level of weird. Not the jeebies, yet, but who knows what the future holds, although I would be happy to make do without the jeebies. You know what I mean? Tell me you know what I mean.”

Bloodhound does. The substance itself - Elliott is right, ‘goo’ is a fitting name - does not look particularly threatening, though deeply unpleasant, but there is a strange feeling of...dread. Dread is probably the correct word. They should not be here. They should leave. They should…

Bloodhound clenches their fists, grinding the tingle away between their knuckles, and banishes the thought, pushes back against it, heads into the maw.

“Come. Let us find my mother’s lab.”

If Elliott questions their decision, he does not voice his doubts.

It is not a difficult search, between the well-lit corridors and the legibly labeled directions. There is nothing memorable about their trek at all if not for the fact that the light is still somehow on - and the strange goo seeping between the panels, peeking from behind the baseboards. It does not seem to be moving. It is just _there,_ and the awareness of it pinches the scruff of Bloodhound’s neck. What is it? Is it sentient? _Sapient?_

Their mother’s lab is...discouragingly impersonal. Just like many other rooms, it is messy in the wake of the explosion, undamaged this deep underground but shaken and rattled, but there is nothing calling for Bloodhound’s attention among the objects strewn on the floor. No photographs, no long-dried out plants - not even a calendar.

Some of the surfaces are covered in thick layers of the goo - even if there is something hiding underneath, there is no way for them to find out. It sprawls on the floor like the roots of a ravenous tree digging into the soil, pushes its tendrils into bookcases and drawers, the core of it lying thick and dark by a closed door on the other side of the lab. 

There is no body. Something piercing unclenches in Bloodhound at the realization, relief and foreboding twined indistinguishably together, coming home but not recognizing its walls. 

“Anything?” Elliott asks, though there is nothing Bloodhound sees that he does not. 

“No,” Bloodhound says anyway, tamping down on their frustration. There was never going to be an easy answer, and they were foolish to hope anyway.

Elliott takes a careful step to where the goo has made home on top of a stainless steel desk. “I _wonder_ what it is though…” he muses, and before Bloodhound has the chance to say anything, he is touching it.

It appears to be sticky, judging by the fact that it effortlessly steals his glove.

“Elliott!” Bloodhound snaps. “What are you doing?”

“Come on, babe, it’s everywhere! We gotta know at least _something_ about it in case it becomes, you know, relevant.” Elliott wrestles the glove back from the goo; it stretches out into peaks and strands as far as it can, slowly settling back into a smooth, shiny surface afterwards. “Now we know that it’s _very_ sticky.”

“Do _not_ touch it.” Bloodhound glares at Elliott’s bare hand where he is gripping the rescued glove by the cuff.

“Don’t you worry, I only pretend to be an idiot.” Elliott picks the remaining bits of goo off with his still-gloved hand, carefully wiping it on a free stretch of the nearest wall. It peels off without a trace, slides down the wall as if eager to rejoin the rest.

Bloodhound smothers the unsettling feeling crawling up their spine.

“But hey, I’m just saying, good thing Artur decided not to come - he’d probably try to fight this thing.”

Elliott means it in jest, but the observation is astute. Artur does not take kindly to threats.

They should continue - there is nothing for them here. But Bloodhound - Bloodhound cannot leave this place without giving it another try, without making sure that this path truly has nowhere to lead, and so they pick their way across the room, pressing up against the first aid cabinet that has apparently been left untouched by the goo, and pull the door open.

_Dread_ rises in them like drownwater, hatred and hopelessness and despair, so thick and freezing that they forget to look away, locked in primal fright, air hanging iron-heavy in their chest. They breathe and breathe and _breathe_ through it, but it does not end.

It must have been a testing room, something with a flow hood and glass boxes and recording equipment, but Bloodhound cannot even gauge its full layout as almost every surface is engulfed in goo. It feels like stepping into the intestines of a gigantic beast, immense and shapeless and...

“Is it...moving? Is it _actually_ moving?” Elliott asks, and oh, it really seems to be the case. It is shifting in pulsating undulations, so slow that it would be easy to miss on its own, but now that they _know_ it is there it is impossible to _stop_ noticing. “Hound - uh. Are you sure about all this.”

Bloodhound closes the door (it squelches - some of the goo has spilled over the threshold), takes a measured step away, breathes again. “You may go, if you wish.” The words come with neither bitterness, nor surprise. “I must press on. I must finally uncover the truth.”

To be afraid and to fear are two different things. Bloodhound might be afraid - they are not in the habit of lying to themself, not about this - but that is a natural reaction to something unknown, an alarm system to keep the mind sharp in the face of potential danger. But they have no fear, no matter what this... _thing_ is invoking in them.

But if _Elliott_ fears - if Elliott is not ready - they do not blame him, truly. This was never his fight anyway.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says, and there is a short pause, a soft sound of him wetting his lips. “I’ve seen worse. My teenage years bedroom, for example.”

Bloodhound smiles, then lets out a short laugh when they remember that he cannot see their face, the strange jumble of darkness loosening its hold on them. 

They really do love him, this brave, ridiculous man.

“I’m guessing you haven’t seen anything like this before?” Elliott asks. “No point hoping that it’s just, like…a Talos thing?”

Bloodhound shakes their head. “My current theory is that it must be feeding on branthium. That is the simplest explanation, as branthium is a very powerful source of energy, and if this substance has infiltrated the electronics, perhaps it acts as a conduit to that energy.”

“That would explain the lights.” Elliott snaps his fingers and frowns when the gloves swallow the sound.

“Yes. It would also explain why I have not encountered it before - if branthium is contained to this sealed area, then so is the substance feeding off of it.”

“So what do we do now?”

“It is of no concern to us. We stay clear of it and continue the search.”

***

They come across the first body soon after leaving the lab. Although saddened by the sight, Bloodhound is far from surprised: the upper levels have been turned into a graveyard too as people tried to flee the catastrophe. Some still wear the anti-earthquake gear, some are clad in lab coats or fullbody protection suits, but the sweeping hand of the land’s divine retribution cared little for such insignificant, fragile, flimsy things.

Thirty years later, skeletons and fabric are all that remains, and Bloodhound has spent hours and hours, over multiple visits, checking their name tags in search of something familiar and murmuring belated prayers. It is comforting to think that even in this frozen wasteland, even three decades later, someone might come to the victims of nature’s righteous revenge and perform the last rites for them. It is a consolation, to live in a world like this. 

The fallen one is wearing a chemical protection suit, the visor of their helmet made opaque with age. They are lying on their side with their back pressed to the wall, and Bloodhound moves their thin arm from where it obscures the name tag - _may you have found peace, Niamh Viel_ \- and straightens up again. 

The cause of death is not immediately obvious - there are no spots of dried blood, no tears in the suit, no unnatural bends of their limbs or spine. It feels incomplete, to bless them into the afterlife without knowing where their death had brought them.

“I am not sure what they have died to,” Bloodhound echoes, watching Elliott as he kneels before them and leans forward, fiddling with something below the helmet.

“It’s - um,” Elliott winces after a short pause and gets back up. “Crana-- cra-uhh, skull trauma.”

Oh - what does he see that they have missed? “How do you know?”

“I listened to the black box. It’s - yeah - definitely sounded like that.”

“The black box?” Bloodhound repeats in confusion. They are for spacecrafts and debt collector vehicles and the military, not…not people, surely?

Elliott crouches down again and taps at a fingernail-sized device under the chin of the helmet - Bloodhound has always assumed it to be the comms. “This one right here. You’re actually supposed to collect them like our metadata cartridges and hook them to the special recorders with a power source, and then you can like...play them multiple times, download the files, run through analyzers, stuff like that. But for the field they are supposed to have just enough charge to play the last ten seconds or so before the vitals flatline.”

“Is that what you did just now?”

“Yeah. It’s - yeah. Makes me think of the Games, actually - people already upload all kinds of death noises compilations online, this would probably be a lot easier than scouring the TV feeds for the good stuff, maybe we should float this by the orgs.” His reflexive grin tapers off into a wince. “I’m kidding, of course. Not very funny. Or at all, really. Here, I’ll show you how to patch into them from our comms - if you wanna. I mean, I’ve wasted the charge of this one already, but like. For future reference.”

“You are very knowledgeable about this,” Bloodhound points out as they crouch beside him, watching his fingers work.

“Yeah, it’s an, um,” Elliott glances at them and back down at the body, “Search and Rescue kinda thing. Ma had some projects in that area, and taught me the basics on the suit she kept from here.” 

In all their visits to this place, in all their fruitless search, not once has Bloodhound thought about checking these boxes. Read out the names of the fallen, and prayed for them, and paid their respects in silence, but never - never. It took Elliott’s clinical eye to reach into the minds of the dead the way they were unable to.

Oh - what if they find - what if they find their mother? Will they - hear her too?

Bloodhound swallows the thought down, feels it settle uneasily in the pit of their stomach. It is pointless to wonder about it right now, but wondering is all they have ever had.

They walk on, room after room, level after level, deeper and deeper into the tomb, kneeling by the bodies, hearing them out, gifting them attention before they move on. Neither is a stranger to hearing death - from their own throats or from throats under their hands, but this is different. Nothing remains after they cry their last. There is no way out of here.

The dead are watching, their jealous gazes fixed on the back of Bloodhound’s head no matter which way they turn. Dread hangs heavy in the air, muffling the sounds, clouding Bloodhound’s vision, and they press on and on with slowly mounting desperation.

They need to get out. There is nothing waiting for them but the tidal pull of oblivion, and its black waters keep creeping higher.

“Hey buddy, slow down a little, won’t you,” Elliott’s voice reaches them through the fog, but it sounds so distant. Although the distance is a good thing - it means that he is away from this place, they should both be away from this place, they need to go. “Do you even know where we’re going?” There is a squelch and a disgusted huff. “Oh shit.”

Where _are_ they going? Bloodhound shakes their head but the fog keeps clinging, and the goo is dripping down the walls - is there more of it now? Is it growing, or are they getting closer to its - epicenter?

This is the wrong way, then. They should go back, take a different turn - but which way is back? Which way is north?

“Huh - what’s that…” There is a note of wonder embroidering Elliott’s voice. “Roger…? What are you doing here?”

The name is not unfamiliar, tinged with the melancholy of the few times Elliott felt inclined to reach deep inside himself with shaking hands and drag out a tangled, writhing mass for Bloodhound to see. Roger was one of his brothers, and they all died together, but not here, they could not have been here at all - who is he talking to?

“Elliott?”

Bloodhound wades their way back to him, the air feeling thick where it presses and parts around their body, sour where it filters through their respirator, and Elliott - Elliott is staring down the corridor, a granite gravity to his unmoving form, but there is nothing to see there. There is nobody. 

“Elliott,” Bloodhound repeats, coming to stand beside him, their body at an angle, their feet light like nothing else is.

“I…” He turns his head towards them in small, aborted movements, but his gaze stays magnet-pulled to whatever it is he is seeing until it finally wavers and snaps and finds Bloodhound’s eyes instead. 

He looks - lost and confused and oddly _aware_ of it, and a nascent panic begins curdling in Bloodhound’s chest, the smallest tremor underfoot, a flock of birds changing direction mid-flight. 

“Hound, something’s wrong.” The words leave Elliott in a rush, break out right through the cracks as his mask shatters. “Something’s - my _mind,_ it’s…”

It is not confusion - it is _fear,_ and Bloodhound recognizes this particular brand of it, the way it tightens his features, the same nauseating apprehension he wears around his mother…

...And then it smoothes out like winter water under a dead wind, retreating deeper into his skin, and his eyes darken, and whatever it is that has made him stand so still before locks him in place again, his shoulders unnaturally straight, his head lowered.

He reaches out.

Bloodhound takes a step back, a rush of warmth spilling down their veins to their arms and legs, warming their jaws, the pressure in the respirator changing as their breaths grow shallow and fast. 

Elliott sighs - or perhaps laughs, a long, hissing exhalation, and there is something black in his mouth, staining his teeth, the seam of his lips - the same substance covering the walls, pulsating on the floor. It caught him - oh Gods, it caught him, however that happened, and now it will use him to get Bloodhound too, and they need to save him, to think, and think fast - but there is no time for that, not when he is so close, not when he is steady in his mudslide approach the way no human can be.

Bloodhound bolts. 

They do not watch where they run, focused on shifting the treacherous floor back from under their feet, on evading the intestine-soft traps of the goo, and Elliott - Elliott gives chase.

_“Wait, come here, listen,”_ he calls, and even his voice is wrong now, shadows under blue ice, poisoned by whatever is corroding his chest. 

Bloodhound runs and runs and runs, through hallways and labs and offices, taking sharp turns and leaping over the goo and toppling tables and bookcases in their wake, but Elliott pushes on, unheeding, undeterred, the fall of his footsteps unchanging, and he is getting closer in his eerily steady pursuit.

_“You will not_ **_listen!_ ** _”_

Elliott barrels into Bloodhound from behind, and they go down hard, catching something with their shoulder - a table, drawers - and twist in the air, landing on the floor to the sound of metal clattering around them, to the messy spill of supplies from their torn bag. 

Elliott presses down on them, snarling and terrible, his dead eyes locked onto theirs. Bloodhound does not try to plead with him: you can never reason with what desires to kill you. It had to pass the point of no return on the way to this.

And this thing inside him - it hungers for their death.

Bloodhound attempts to buck Elliott off, to push at his shoulder, but he is sitting on their thighs, his bulk leaving them no leverage. And when Bloodhound tries to twist their way out of his hold, away from the fingers clawed in their collar, Elliot smacks a hand down by their head - the awful, unblinking stare still boring into their eyes - and draws it back with something clenched in it, and in the next moment the fist descends to the sharp, salt-white shock of pain under Bloodhound’s collarbone that punches the breath out of them.

Bloodhound cries out in surprise - or tries - whatever Elliott has stabbed them with, it must have pierced their lung, oh _Gods_ \- it hurts to breathe - it hurts to…

_“Haaaagrhhhh…”_ Elliott leans over to where he is skewering Bloodhound to the floor, and the goo collects on his tongue, between his teeth, pools behind his lower lip, and it will drip onto Bloodhound soon in a pull that is heavier than gravity, and their respirator might be sealed to their skin but there is still the exit valve, and if it gets in through that there is nothing, nothing, nothing they can do.

Is this it? Are they both going to die here, consumed by this thing? Will they stay here forever, join the legion of ghosts? Bloodhound’s overdrive heart is choking them up as the raised sword begins its descent, the pulse hammering in their ears, _death to-death to-death to-death to-death to-death._

Not now. Not today. Not this one.

Some threats cannot be dealt with by grabbing them tight or throwing them away. They bear down on you regardless, and all you can do is fight back with all you have.

Bloodhound gropes blindly around as they gasp uselessly for breath, feels their hand close around something, and swings at Elliott. Their aim is off, confused, wavering, but they still catch him in the shoulder, push it deeper, twist it cruelly in, anything to gain the upper hand for just a moment, anything to distract him, anything to make him _stop._

It is a syringe, and Bloodhound, momentarily stupefied, watches the pump slide in as it empties itself into Elliott’s body.

A full-body shudder seizes him in a violent wave, and Bloodhound uses this chance to roll both of them over and straddle Elliott’s chest, knees pressing down on his arms. He jerks beneath them, crying out and tossing his head, and then there is a strange gurgle bubbling up his throat, and he twists his head to the side as the goo comes spilling out. It froths a sickly yellow as every seizure pushes more of it out, and it does not end - how much of it _was_ in him? If it has fed on him - oh no…

There are more syringes lying around, most still blessedly capped, and Bloodhound grabs the closest one and with the other hand tears out the thing still embedded in their chest - it seems to be a scalpel, a vicious line of steel. They stab themself with the syringe instead, right into the growing splotch of red - _help self first to help those in need -_ and pull in a wet gasp as the fresh puncture is resealed.

Elliott is still frothing - whatever the goo is, it does not react kindly to the nanobytes, they must have recognized it as the invader and are expelling it. Bloodhound quickly reaches for more syringes, nearly falling off when the world swims precariously for a second, but Elliott is not trying to throw them off anymore, only twitching weakly when they administer more medicine.

There is a horrible, clammy taste in the back of Bloodhound’s throat that has nothing to do with the blood from the punctured lung that came dripping up their trachea. Are they too late? Is the damage too severe? Or maybe - what if Elliott has any conditions that would make it worse - Evelyn has mentioned on that evening how he was a sickly baby, and she said it laughingly, but it is suddenly not funny at all.

Is this what is demanded of Bloodhound, then, if they wish to learn the truth? Is this the death that has to happen in exchange for an older death? Is this how it is supposed to go?

No. The price is named, but Bloodhound is not ready to pay it.

They get off of Elliott and roll him into recovery position, wiping the bubbling spill away with their supply bag, and check his pulse with a hastily ungloved hand, and resist the useless urge to cradle him. He is panting softly now, and the goo is not seeping out of his mouth anymore, but Bloodhound injects him with another syringe just for good measure and he, overhealed and shaking, comes awake with a violent, tearing gasp.

“Hou-- haa…”

_“Elliott,”_ Bloodhound cups his face with both hands as he rolls onto his back, and he feels warm through the glove, hot against their bared skin, “Are you okay? I am sorry, I am so sorry.”

He is coughing and blinking up at them, and they watch awareness creep back into his eyes, no longer shackled by that uncanny focus but living, moving, latching onto Bloodhound’s gaze in search for a familiar lifeline, not to sate an alien hunger. He is alright. He is alright.

Why does this keep happening? What kind of catalyst is Bloodhound that it keeps resulting in their living pitted against their dead? What lesson are they failing to learn? The one about giving up on the past before it destroys their present? Forgetting it all, throwing it away, erasing from history? Is this what the Gods want from them?

“Hound,” Elliott calls again, a strange sort of elation on his face, his hand covering their wrist, a finger caressing the skin between the glove and the cuff of their sleeve, softening their wild pulse, but Bloodhound does not have the time to process it.

“We will leave,” is the answer that comes to them, tumbles out of their mouth for whoever is there to witness. “We will go. We will not return.”

“Hound, hear me out--”

“I cannot lose you,” Bloodhound blurts out, alloys the plea and the fear into a promise with the frantic beating of their heart. It is not worth it - they would pay with themself but not with Elliott, he cannot be the price, they will not allow it. “I cannot lose you, Elliott, not for this, not for anything.”

They should not have brought him here in the first place. They _knew_ they should not have, this entire time. Those who tempt fate get what is coming to them.

“Wait, ‘leave’? What are you - talking about,” Elliott hauls himself up into a sitting position, coughs, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, cringes when he looks at the result. “After all this?”

“Elliott - it had control over you,” Bloodhound squeezes their hands together when they fall into their lap, feeling the beginnings of hysteria as they point it out. ‘After all this’ is exactly the reason they should go. If the lesson has anything at all to do with sunk cost fallacy, then Bloodhound is determined to learn it before it is too late.

“Yes, but - listen, I think - I think I understand it now,” Elliott presses on, and something in his words catches on the edge of Bloodhound’s hearing, inhuman and wrong.

_(“You will not_ **_listen_ ** _.”)_

There is an unused syringe within easy reach, and Bloodhound swipes it in one quick motion and swings at Elliott. If it is still inside of him, if it still controls him--

“Whoa - stop - Hound, I’m fine! I’m me!” Elliott blocks their swing with his forearm, but when he covers their fist with his other hand, the touch is soft. Soothing. “You don’t understand - I think I heard it.”

“You - what?” 

“Yeah, I…” Elliott gives a small squeeze to their hand, releases it so he can gesticulate, trusting Bloodhound to lower the syringe. “Well, not exactly _heard_ it, it wasn’t words, that’s for sure, but I - I think I understand what it wants.” His words make no sense, but his eyes are clear in the strangest contradiction. “This thing. I think we can set it free.”

“‘Set it free’?” Bloodhound repeats after him, understanding slipping farther and farther out of their reach. “Elliott, you severely underestimate how close I am to overhealing you again.”

Elliott breathes out a laugh but quickly grows serious again - perhaps he heard the threatening note in Bloodhound’s voice.

“No, I mean - I think that it doesn’t want to be here. No, wrong - I think it doesn’t want to _exist_ here. If that makes sense. That’s what it was trying to convey.” Elliott’s eyes tick downwards from Bloodhound’s face, and he frowns, and brings up a cautious, uncertain hand to touch the side of their chest. When Bloodhound breathes, they feel the ghost of the wound press up against his fingers. An awful look crosses Elliott’s face.

Bloodhound covers his hand with theirs before he can pull it away, molds it tighter against the drafty, uneasy feeling in their chest. “It was trying to kill us.”

With what looks to be a great effort, Elliott lifts his gaze back up, away from the red mark. “Yeah, I’m - I’m aware.” His fingers twitch under Bloodhound’s in a silent apology. “I’m not sure it really understands nuance. I’m not sure it has the capacity. But what I mean is - haven’t you felt weird around it this entire time? Like, worse than you normally would from some random goo? I know I have.”

“We fear what we do not understand,” Bloodhound responds, but the familiar axiom rings superficial, an empty ward against the wrong evil.

“Yeah, but - come on, we were off since the moment we got into this section. And you didn’t even touch anything, so it’s not about contanim-- comtamin-- not about ‘goo, meet mucous membranes’, not in your case.”

Bloodhound thinks about the strange brain fog, the watchful ghostly eyes, the sensation of despairing, aimless urgency so potent that it could not possibly fit in one person. The caged feeling, wall-to-wall, no escape, no north because north is a concept left to the outside world, because north means having somewhere to go.

(An invisible beast, sluggish and limp and confused, but with a primordial rage already budding in its winter-slow blood.)

If none of that was their own, but belonging to something that has lived on branthium long enough to evolve this far - that has been trapped here all these years...

“It is hurting,” Bloodhound realizes. “It wishes to pass on.”

“Yeah,” Elliott sighs and tips his head in a nod. “Yeah.”

But how can they make this happen? The medicine has expelled it from Elliott’s body, and Bloodhound is suddenly reminded of the first aid cabinet in their mother’s lab, carefully avoided by the goo. The nanobytes are the answer, they have to be. 

“Besides - you’re here for closure, right?” Elliott lowers his hand, bringing Bloodhound’s with it, runs his thumb over their knuckles. This is the ungloved hand - they should cover it again, it is too cold here even with the heating on, but touching Elliott feels more important right now. “And we, well, we’ve come so far already. Might as well not give up for a little longer.”

Bloodhound watches Elliott watch their hands and thinks about the pictures in Evelyn Witt’s home with people filling them up frame to frame; thinks about the dinner table that was never meant to only seat one, the plates and the cutlery coming from too many sets. 

Maybe this is not just about them. Maybe there is still something they can do right, here.

A memory blindsides Bloodhound and they straighten up so suddenly that it startles Elliott. “You _fool!”_ They would be angry if they were not so punch-drunk with relief. “I _told_ you not to touch it!”

Elliott’s smile is sheepish, and he brings up his other hand to cradle Bloodhound’s in both of his. “Well, for what it’s worth, _that_ time was unintentional.”

That is right - another memory struggles up from the cloudy depths - he was hurrying after them, was he not? What happened - did he slip? fall?

“Hey, no, you stop it,” he chides, and Bloodhound resurfaces with their hand gripping Elliott’s. “Weird goo mind control, yeah? Let’s leave it at that.”

He gets up, but their hands are still linked, and so Bloodhound has no choice but to let him pull them to their feet as well, though they hardly need the help.

Neither do they need to place their free hand on his waist, strictly speaking, but they do it anyway, move to the small of his back, study his eyes. “Are you alright, Elliott? Truly?”

Elliott holds them closer, wraps an arm around their shoulders, and Bloodhound cannot help leaning in. They close their eyes for a moment and let out a strained sigh that hisses through the respirator. 

“Yeah.” Elliott presses his head against the top of their helmet - they hear his beard scratch against it. Their still linked hands are growing warm between them. “I’m alright, honey. The whole possession thing is obviously messed up, not gonna lie, but I wasn’t very - aware of what was happening. I’m fine.” His arm tightens around them. “I’ll be fine. Honestly, I’m even kinda glad that it was - that. And not...something else.”

Bloodhound did not use to bemoan the border of their gear isolating them from the world. It used to mean nothing but safety and comfort and the kind of freedom that comes from leaving no footholds for people to make assumptions. A polite distance, a chance to pause and consider and _decide_ to be known. And then they met Elliott, and he knew them anyway, _chose_ to learn them like one might learn a song in a foreign language, repeating the unfamiliar syllables again and again until they start making sense, and since then the layers between them have been getting more and more suffocating in their superfluity.

Bloodhound wishes they could hold him properly, kiss him, reaffirm his safety. 

Well. Perhaps later.

“We should go,” they murmur instead, wincing at the regret clear in their voice. Justify it by stepping away from Elliott, the air another border between them once their hands part as well.

“We should, yeah. Come on, Houndie, we still have a lot of ground to cover - I think,” Elliott pauses, frowning in confusion. “I said that, but I’m not actually sure. Where are we now, exactly?”

***

They continue through the facility level by level, still looking for something, anything, but now collecting medical supplies on the way as well. The plan, once they are done, is to plant them in several big clusters throughout the building and rig up small explosives that would release the nanobytes into the goo when triggered.

If everything works as intended, it will die. It is not meant to exist outside, but nothing deserves a life in a cage. 

The goo is everywhere now, forcing them to carefully pick their way through the gaps, and soon Bloodhound gives up on trying to read the labels and the signs, trusting their sense of direction and the runes instead. 

But it is as if it senses their intentions, and several times Bloodhound catches it shifting away from door handles and stairs - almost apologetically so, like a dog who grew up to be too big in a house that remained small.

The lab is nameless when Bloodhound first steps in and heads to where they by now can veritably guess its first aid kit to be. It does - did - belong to someone, obviously, but the name shield in the hallway is obscured, and so is the keycard slot near the door.

Bloodhound throws a quick look in that direction, a well-trained instinct always prompting them to check the exit routes, and pauses when they notice the change. The goo has moved away in their wake, uncovering the slot - and the label on it.

_[ E. Witt ]_

“Elliott,” Bloodhound calls in the first breath they get - he should be looting the lab across the hallway. They look quickly around, glancing over the charts and books and equipment, and spot a desk and a tablet on it. If Elliott responds, they do not hear him over the hum rising in their ears.

It must be Evelyn’s logbook. It has to be. Goo is seeping sluggishly from the ports, but Bloodhound grabs the tablet anyway and presses the power button. The screen lights up, its blue-white rectangle littered with timestamped entries, and Bloodhound grips the tablet tighter and scrolls through it, eyes scanning Evelyn’s notes at random.

**_PROJECT HEPATICUM, ENTRY 26, 2704CC/4/13 22:13T, E.W._ **

Swap Protocol 43a to 44.1a to account for the change in the exothermic reaction. Message K.v.N. and ask him to order the wires, or we won’t be ready by 4/30.

**_PROJECT HEPATICUM, ENTRY 32, 2704CC/4/15 14:56T, E.W._ **

The wind up time keeps rising, 3.3s to 4.5s today alone. Either the insulation isn’t enough, or there’s a leak. Tell C. to check.

**_PROJECT HEPATICUM, ENTRY 39, 2704CC/4/19 8:22T, E.W._ **

Sample seems to react better to Fe2+ ions than Fe3+. No clue why - wish they asked an actual chemist instead. Encasing the sample in hard light provides better insulation after all, but the double refraction messes with the optics.

**_PROJECT HEPATICUM, ENTRY 40, 2704CC/4/19 16:37T, E.W._ **

Fixed the refraction issue by reprogramming the optical analysis bot. The numbers are stable. We are so close! 4/30 seems doable.

**_PROJECT HEPATICUM, ENTRY 63, 2704CC/4/29 21:15T, E.W._ **

Checked the numbers again, installed a failsafe, told C. to be on standby with a hard light bubble if it decides to wild out. Tomorrow!!!

**_PROJECT HEPATICUM, ENTRY 64, 2704CC/4/30 8:32T, B.I._ **

Hi Evie! This is me, writing in your notes. Dr Fahti looks a tad frazzled about the last second replacement, but I assured her of my capabilities in re: kicking Hepaticum off, and we are proceeding as scheduled. The launch is at 1100, so I will run the last preparations and update when everything is ready. Hope your littlest one feels better soon.

The slider crams itself into the bottom of the page, but there is nowhere for it to go.

Some threats - some threats do not care whether you drop them or hold them tighter or try to fight. They hit you anyway and leave you to live with the knowledge, with your scraped out husk, with the astringent taste in your mouth, with the awareness of time stretching out before you that you will now live carrying that weight. 

Bloodhound slowly puts the tablet down. 

“Hound? You called?” 

That is Elliott’s voice, but they cannot bring themself to focus on it, to react, to betray in any way the fact that they are still living. 

The sounds of his footsteps coming closer. “I couldn’t actually find anything in the other one, but I got stuck reading this guy’s journal on-- wait, that’s,” he stops abruptly, his voice changing in quality as he turns his head. “That’s - that’s my brothers in the picture, what… Wait - are we in my mom’s lab?”

A sickly baby. Elliott was a sickly baby, and Evelyn laughed fondly as she recounted carrying him around day and night to keep him soothed, and Elliott groaned and tried to change the subject, and Bloodhound grinned behind their mask - amused, oblivious. 

(“There and back, I promise, you won’t even notice.” She ruffles their hair with one hand even as she’s tucking the ends of her tightened shoelaces into the boots with the other. 

“I’m noticing! I’m noticing right now!” They stomp their foot, righteously angry the way anyone would be after waking up in the early morning to noises coming from beyond their bedroom door and assuming it to be their birthday surprise, only to find out that it was the exact opposite.

“I know, prowler-pup, but I have to. I’m sorry.” And then she rises from her crouch and fits the driving goggles over her eyes, and her light woolen coat is checkered, forest green and nightfall blue. It smells like their closet and her perfume. Her face is so far away. “Now come on, off you go, before I open the door and turn you into an icicle. Wake up your father, you can play hunters until I’m back.”)

Bloodhound tries to sink to the floor where they stand, dragged down by the weight, but the chair is in the way, and so they end up perching on its edge. Has their mother sat on it too as she made that note? Did she get to sit on it again in between the last preparations and cross-checks? If the launch was scheduled for eleven in the morning, they did not have time to do it - the explosion happened earlier than that. None of this matters.

“Are you - are you okay, buddy? What’s this…” A movement in Bloodhound’s periphery as Elliott picks up the tablet, and Bloodhound watches the brief silence stretch, the last moments before he learns it too. “Oh. Oh fuck.”

She lied, too - that is what Bloodhound’s mind, bizarrely, latches onto. She left at a quarter to eight, and the launch was supposed to be at eleven, and Gods know how long it would go for, not to mention recording all the data and running the preliminary analysis and…

And it does not matter either. It does not matter at all.

“Houndie - Hound, I’m so sorry, I can’t believe this, it’s--” Elliott stammers, muffled, underwater, “I would’ve told you, I didn’t know, I don’t remember any of this, I-- I…”

Elliott’s voice is shaky - he is in distress, and Bloodhound turns their head, follows it like a beacon, a tangible _something_ to fix. 

“Stop,” they remind him, but he shakes his head.

“I’m _sorry,”_ he pleads, quiet and small. “If not for that - if not for - for _me…”_

Elliott is trying to find the courage to say that he wishes it happened differently. But he would not mean it, cannot possibly mean it, and Bloodhound does not want him to flay himself with such a lie. All their fates have been decided long ago - it is pointless to worry the wounds of ‘what if’.

“It’s okay,” Bloodhound says and tries to mean it too - because it _is,_ kind of, okay, under this particular prism, the one tiny island in the sea of every other way it cannot ever be okay. “I would not take her away from you.”

“But _I_ did, I did, I’m so sorry--”

“No,” Bloodhound interrupts him firmly. One of them has to be firm. They get up, take the tablet from Elliott’s slack fingers, force their unwieldy body between him and the desk, wait until his haunted eyes find theirs. “You were a baby. You could not possibly know. Elliott, your mother _lives.”_ The abysmal, ancient rift in their chest yawns wider. “Do not insult this gift.”

Would _Bloodhound_ have traded Elliott’s mother for theirs? Turn back the clock and force it down a different path, aware of the consequences?

They do not know. They do not have to know. It does not matter.

Such questions only exist for the sake of their cruelty, such answers only serve to wound. Even now, butchered and bleeding and robbed by the merciless hand of fate, they do not wish to be cruel.

“I’m sorry, Houndie,” Elliott murmurs. He is crying silently now, tears rolling freely down his cheeks, catching on the dips of scars and disappearing into his beard. “I’m sorry for - for your loss.”

Bloodhound’s vision is blurry - something must be wrong with the lenses - but no, it turns out that they are crying too. They do not remove their goggles, and it pools along the bottom seam, stinging their skin and eyes with salt.

“Let us continue,” they mutter and scowl at nothing when the words come out stiff and thick, flattened into monotone under the weight of tears.

“Are-- are you sure?” Elliott sniffles, covering his face for a moment as he wipes his eyes with his sleeve. “You don’t wanna - I dunno.”

“I wished to find an answer - and I have.” Never mind that their heart weighs heavy like a drown-stone in the wake of it. “We still have a job to do.” A straightforward job, clean-cut and simple. Something they can do. Something they can change, a measure of momentum to keep them going until they find out how to breathe again. 

If they stop moving, they might stay here.

They turn towards the door, and behind them Elliott shifts and stutters out a sigh and falls into step after a second of hesitation. “Yeah. Sure. Sounds good - yeah. Let’s get it done.”

They keep looting and leaving the supplies in stacks and piles every time they become too heavy to carry, but the weight pushing Bloodhound down remains no matter what they do or where they drag their body.

There is a gap in Bloodhound’s memory. Children’s recollection is flighty and malleable, so Bloodhound has only salvaged a handful of images, sounds, and smells even from the time before the disaster, but after comes an amorphous, disorienting void. The earliest memory Bloodhound can recall after that hails from when they were about seven years old - or maybe eight - and Uncle Artur finally allowed them into his smithy, satisfied with how their eyes have adjusted to the goggles and relatively certain that the brightness of the fires would do them no harm.

Getting used to the world of near-blindness was overwhelming and exhausting. Mourning turned every new day into a nonsensical and bleak copy of the day before. And as Bloodhound grew up, some of the memories they did retain got suppressed - they still feel them slither and writhe under the surface sometimes, still avoid looking too closely. In the end, precious little remains.

This is the explanation they have pieced together for themself over the years as they gained knowledge and understanding - and maybe it is also the reason that now that grief has finally caught up to them and came into colours out of the nebulous, faraway uncertainty, it feels so quietly, staggeringly violent.

Together, they rig up a few simple trigger bombs - though ‘bombs’ is an overstatement, all they will do is inject the nanobytes from the deconstructed syringes into the goo at the same time. They place them throughout the lowest levels, and the goo parts before them almost like the tide, inviting them deeper, to places where there is almost no space to turn or stand up straight - where the nanobytes would be at their most effective. An alien sense of relief prickles the back of Bloodhound’s neck.

They go as far up as they can without losing the signal for the remote control, and Bloodhound nods at Elliott to press the button. They do not see the nanobytes in action, holed up in a clean room just in case, but a shiver passes through the plant, and when they venture into the hallway there are only a few remaining bubbles popping quietly along the baseboards.

It is faint, unassuming even. A mundane death for something that never asked to be alive in the first place.

Its death uncovers another graveyard, all the bodies that have been hidden under its sprawling bulk. Bloodhound steps among them (alone - Elliott has pulled ahead), strung along by the sorrowful and strained feeling, the narrow isolated world thrown into a particular kind of focus that comes from knowing that you will not be returning here.

Because they will not. They got their answer, for better or worse - this torturous pilgrimage can finally come to an end. _Something_ can finally come to an end.

The comms crackle to life. What for? They are not far enough from each other to be out of earshot - Bloodhound heard Elliott walk around up until just now. 

“Hound - um,” he comes through, his voice soft and strangely hesitant. “I think - I think I found her,” he says, and Bloodhound’s blood runs cold and thin. “I mean, I can’t be completely sure, because - yeah - but the name matches up. Do you wanna...” He pauses. They hear him breathe in; out; in again. “Do you wanna. Come look.”

They do not, they do not _do not do not,_ pulse tuned to the rhythm the same way it is to a different pair of words, but their feet carry them towards Elliott’s dear voice anyway, to a room - another lab, probably, or an office, not that any of that is important - and they almost step in when he suddenly fills the doorway, interrupting their flight. 

“Hi - I, um,” he pauses immediately and scratches the back of his head. He is tapping his foot, a rabbit’s heartbeat. “Just wanted to check in with you first, before - before that.”

“I am fine.” Bloodhound slowly shakes their head. “I wish to see.”

“Right, okay, yeah.” There is something precarious in Elliott’s expression, a near-flinch of hearing ice crack underfoot, and then he lifts a hand and squeezes Bloodhound’s shoulder. It is a grounding force in a sea of ghosts, and Bloodhound is grateful for it, they are, but they feel so heavy.

“I’m gonna be right outside if you need anything, yeah?” He throws a look at them, his face pinched but eyes unwavering until they nod in response. “Right - yeah. Okay. See you in a bit, then.”

The solid reassurance of his hand falls away. Untethered, Bloodhound fades into the fog.

It _is_ a lab. Stainless steel tables, plugged in equipment, an even sheen of overhead lights - it would look disarmingly normal if not for the body.

It is her. She is lying supine and wearing the anti-earthquake gear, a bulky suit that could be blown up against a sudden compression - though its mechanism has been left untriggered - and the front of her helmet is an opaque visor, but - but there it is, right on the chest, the name, the matronymic. Something coils tighter deep in Bloodhound, then releases like a muscle that has been locked in tension for so long that they forgot how to live without that ache. Perhaps there was a part of them, after all, that hoped against all reason that she was still somehow alive - but now everything is unveiled, and they watch it fall shudderingly away.

Bloodhound lowers their carcass to the floor, takes her in. The black box is sitting under her chin. They could check it, as they have done it dozens of times today. What would they hear, in those last ten seconds? Did she scream, did she cry, did she call out to someone? Would it destroy them to know? Would the memories of her voice match up?

On all those nights spent shedding hopeless tears, drowning in the shroud of their grief, Bloodhound has always imagined that it would help to know how she had died. If maybe they could know just this one thing, it would remove the terrible sawing feeling from between their ribs. 

But no - knowing why she was here did not help, and this would not help either. If anything, it would only twist the knife further in, only hurt them more after it has already shifted in their chest. Maybe this is what they were supposed to be doing all these years instead of trying to take the blade out - to let it grow in for good. To let moss curl over it, and vines, and everything else that could possibly mean life receiving a mortal wound and persevering anyway.

Her last legacy to them, then - this lesson. Acceptance, not oblivion.

She has been asleep for a very long time now. Bloodhound will not disturb her.

Bloodhound pulls their knees up to their chest and drifts in silence. There is so much they could tell her, the ghosts of all the times she could have been there but was not. To speak them now would mean nothing, like dreams mean nothing to someone who has never slept.

They can pray, though. They can do that.

Time passes - it must, surely, though the understanding of its flow flutters out of Bloodhound’s grasp - and reorders itself again with a lurch when Elliott pokes his head into the room.

“Houndie?” He ventures. His eyes are red, and Bloodhound’s fractured heart whines at the sight. “I didn’t mean to dis-- disru-- bother you, but there’s, uh,” he cringes awkwardly, shifts his weight as if to lean against the doorframe but flinches away from it, “there’s a crack in the wall that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there before, and it might be nothing, but it got me thinking - if the goo was everywhere, how much was it actually supporting the structures at this point? Because like, if at all, then we should - probably go while it still holds.”

It is so - anticlimactic, in the end, hurried and off, that Bloodhound would laugh at the absurdity of it if they could summon any humour in themself. But still, it is a shameful kind of relief to get up and go, to have an excuse to do so instead of staying and watching and - and deciding what to do now.

Before they stand up, they pull their father’s keycard out of the pocket and place it over her heart, unclip the sheath with their favourite hunting knife and put it on the floor next to her left hand, within easy reach. They are insufficient guides, too little too late, but this is the best Bloodhound can do. Maybe she would understand.

As they leave, they wonder if this is what closure is supposed to feel like. Wonder where the line lies, beyond which it stops closing in like a tomb.

Sunset bathes the two of them in red as they step outside and make the trek to their snowglider. The plant rises behind them, a stiff corpse impaled on ice.

Maybe it could have the decency to collapse, at least. Finally bury it all in the cradle of its splintered bones, so that Bloodhound leaving it forever would actually mean something. And maybe it will, but for now it keeps standing, staked out for whoever can be bothered to scavenge the carcass.

“Hound,” Elliott begins once they reach the snowglider and he casually nudges Bloodhound towards the passenger seat when they try to get behind the controls. “I have to tell you. I kind of felt - really weird ever since you first asked if you could talk to my mom.” He busies himself with the panel for a moment, flicking a few unnecessary switches. Bloodhound watches his hands, giving him time. “I thought it was because - well - obvious reasons, but maybe - I dunno. Maybe part of me remembered why it happened. Felt guilty.”

It does not matter - another thing that does not matter because _it is not his fault,_ but Elliott is kind and compassionate and will gladly sacrifice himself breath by excruciating breath to spare someone else the dubious privilege of it, and Bloodhound knows that he is going to carry this misplaced guilt with him until it withers away with enough patience and care.

And they will give it to him. _Of course_ they will. But right now, they just want to go home. 

“Thank you for telling me,” Bloodhound says; holds Elliott’s tangled insides carefully in their hands, matches them up against their own gore.

He throws them a quick look as he disengages the breaks. “I love you, Hound.”

“I love you too,” is their ready response, a truth for a truth, but then they pause and circle back to his furtive glance and - maybe this is about the reassurance of it, a truth _despite_ a truth. “Elliott,” they reach out to touch his hand hovering over the steering screen, wait for him to turn to them again, properly this time. “I love you too.”

Elliott’s smile is an upturned frown, quick and wobbly, but he nods and turns to look ahead again. The snowglider roars to life.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading <3 
> 
> i'm clowning at [twt](https://twitter.com/royalcorvids), as per usual


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